


A Single Brown Feather, An Anagram, And A Search In The Dark In The Forest At Night

by two_drama_nerds_in_a_boat



Series: Lumberjanes Week 2020 [1]
Category: Lumberjanes
Genre: Alternate Universe - Voice AU, Day One: Favorite Roanoke, Gen, Lumberjanes Week, Lumberjanes week 2020, Mainly Jo-Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25246138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/two_drama_nerds_in_a_boat/pseuds/two_drama_nerds_in_a_boat
Summary: Jo is clever. She’s clever. She can figure a way out of this.Something’s up with Molly. They’ve all noticed it, by now. She’s acting strange and speaking with an odd lilt to her voice and her eyes have gone just the slightest bit golden. Normally, they all would have attributed it to nerves; camp would be ending, soon. They all knew that. And they all knew that Molly was anxious about it most of all, even if none of them knew exactly why.And today, during capture the flag, Molly disappeared. Mal disappeared, too, shortly after Molly did. They think she was going after her.Jo's clever. She knows she's clever. She'll solve this mystery, she'll get Molly back, and Mal back too. That's what always happens. They always get their happy ending.Right?(Prompt Fill: Favorite Roanoke - for me, that's Jo)
Series: Lumberjanes Week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1828999
Comments: 7
Kudos: 13





	A Single Brown Feather, An Anagram, And A Search In The Dark In The Forest At Night

**Author's Note:**

> Happy first day of Lumberjanes week! I'm thrilled to participate.
> 
> Decided to write a Voice AU because... yeah. Anyway this takes place kind of at the start of the AU, right when Molly starts to get Like That, and the Roanokes don't really understand what's going on yet. 
> 
> This fic has some more horror-y elements to it, so if that's not your thing or you get spooked easily, please be careful!

Jo is clever. She’s clever. She can figure a way out of this. 

Something’s up with Molly. They’ve all noticed it, by now. She’s acting strange and speaking with an odd lilt to her voice and her eyes have gone just the slightest bit golden. Normally, they all would have attributed it to nerves; camp would be ending, soon. They all knew that. And they all knew that Molly was anxious about it most of all, even if none of them knew exactly why. 

(Well. Mal knew exactly why. Jo knew that Mal knew because April heard from Ripley who heard Mal and Molly talking in hushed tones about it, and April wrote this all down in her great pink notebook and she handed it over to Jo for a read-over. Jo is a scientist, first and foremost, yes. But she took a class in crime scene analysis, and one in psychology, and one in forensics; in short, she makes a rather good detective.)

And today, during capture the flag, Molly disappeared. Mal disappeared, too, shortly after Molly did. They think she was going after her.

The rest of the Roanokes are in their cabin, now. Jen’s holding Ripley and holding back tears, the two of them sitting on a bunk together. Meanwhile, April and Jo have put together a bulletin board of clues, cross-referencing the notes they’ve been keeping, trying to figure out what’s going on. 

The Zodiacs are here, too. April thought they’d be of help

“They lost their counselor to the woods at the beginning of the summer,” she’d explained. “I think they might know more than they’re letting on.”  
  
Emily had offered up her notes to Jo; apparently the Roanokes hadn’t been the only ones keeping tabs on everything. Now, Hes and Wren are doing a sweep of the cabin, looking for clues. Cleaning out Molly’s bunk, and then Mal’s, shifting through duffle bags and peeking behind posters. Barney’s attempting to comfort Jen, though how well that’s working is questionable. Diane’s explaining everything she knows about forest magic to Jo - though apparently, she actually doesn’t know that much. 

“It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen, to be honest,” Diane says, sounding defeated. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I’ve never seen a place where time works like this. Not even on Olympus, not even in Hades. As soon as my parents set me down in this forest I felt weird. Like, it was trying to take my magic from me.” Diane’s voice is shaking. “I think it’s hungry.” 

Jo writes that down; she thinks she can work with that, maybe. Diane’s being cryptic, but for the first time, Jo’s willing to believe it’s because she’s actually as in the dark as the rest of them.

  
  
Mackenzie walks up to the bulletin board, eyeing the red string tying together bits and pieces of information. Notes, photographs, pieces of moss, a scrap of green fabric they found snagged on a thornbush during their first search of the forest after realizing Molly was gone. She looks at one photograph, of a dark cave covered by a waterfall. 

“You guys know about the Voice?” She asks. 

They look up at her.

“The Voice?” Says Jo, an echo. “The one that keeps sending monsters after us? The one that made Molly stop time?”

  
  
“Yeah,” Mackenzie says. “It… it took Vanessa from us.” 

  
“Vanessa?”

“Their counselor,” Jen says, standing up. “Purple hair, spiked up all the time, never wore her uniform, took all the good coffee from the mess hall, deadly good at scrabble. Was with us until about a week or so into the summer. And then she disappeared.”

  
Jo looks up from her notes. “The… the Voice took her?”

April’d told her this, of course. Mentioned it in passing. But she hadn’t expected confirmation.

“That’s the only thing that makes sense.” 

“And you think it took Molly, too?” Asks Jo. 

“No,” says Hes. She stands up from where she was kneeling beside Molly’s bunk. She’s holding a single brown feather. “I think she went to it willingly.” 

Hes hands the feather to Jo.

  
  
“What can you say about this?” She asks. 

Jo shrugs. “I…” 

She doesn’t know what to say. 

She’s clever, so, so, clever, but she never learned her birds. The Roanokes have never really been big on earning badges, much more concerned with running about in the woods, causing trouble if they can, stopping it if they must. That’s the point of camp, that chaotic aspect. They hadn’t gotten to birding yet. They were supposed to go two days from now, out in the forest with binoculars. They’d promised Jen. Jo knows it’s not going to happen now. 

“Here,” Jen says, quietly. “Bring it over here, please?”

Jo pads over, keeping her feet light on the ancient wooden floor. The cabin is silent. 

She places the feather in Jen’s hands. 

“It’s unlike any I’ve seen before,” says Jen. She turns it over in her hands a few times, runs her thumb along the soft edge. “It’s a flight feather, definitely. You can see it in the shape, here, the sharpness of the form. But it’s too large to belong to any bird I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s brown,” Jo adds. “So it can’t belong to the Roc - its wings are black.”  
  


“Yes.” 

“Where did you find this?” Asks Jo, though she already knows the answer.

“Molly’s bunk.” 

Her stomach won’t stop twisting itself into knots. 

“Okay. So we think that Molly went to the Voice willingly. Why?”

  
  
“She doesn’t want summer to end,” says Ripley. “Mal… Mal said her parents weren’t nice, like ours are.” 

“She doesn’t want to go home.”

  
  
“The Voice has stopped time before,” says Wren. “We all saw the bubble incident.” 

“The bubble…” Jo’s eyes go wide. “Bubbles! Where’s Bubbles?”

Suddenly they’ve all descended into a bout of chaos, searching the cabin high and low. Jo knows, she _knows_ , that this is the best lead they’re going to get in a long, long while. If they can find the raccoon. 

Ripley’s the one who finds him. Drags him out from under the her bed, a chittering anxious mess. He’s far more animalistic than what Jo’s used to; his normally too-intelligent eyes are dark and terrified, his claws are out and thrashing and frantic. He’s fighting against Ripley. He’s never fought against Ripley before. 

“He’s scared,” she says. 

Jo steps forward to take him from her arms, but April stops her. 

“I’m the strongest one here,” she says, quietly. “I should do this. Just in case he… well, in case he gets any worse.”

Jo nods.

  
  
April reaches out and picks Bubbles up, and he immediately tears a slash in her beautiful lavender sweater. April winces, but Jo can tell it isn’t too bad; there’s no blood. For whatever reason, April’s always been hard to hurt. She’s strong as hell, and her skin doesn’t cut, unyielding to knives or claws or thorns. 

“Molly,” April says to Bubbles. 

Normally, Bubbles’s eyes light up at the name. 

Now, he hisses, fights April’s iron grip even more. 

Jo and April share a look. 

Something is horribly wrong. 

* * *

Jo has never hated investigating the woods at night before, though she’s starting to. 

They’ve split up. Three groups; April, Wren, and Emily in the first. The second, Ripley, Hes, and Jen. Jo, Diane, and Barney in the last one.. 

They know it’s stupid and they know it’s impulsive and they know that the odds of them coming out of this one alive are slim, but they’ve decided to go looking for the Voice’s cave anyway. 

Rosie told them not to, when they told her what was going on. Shouted at them to stay inside. Locked down the camp. It was a pain to get through her security, though easier with Jen on their side. A counselor, it seems, can slip through anything. 

Jo had to make the plan, what with Mal gone. And Jen helped a bit. And they still managed to get through, nonetheless, and out into the woods safe and sound, for now. 

Ripley, Hes, and Jen are trying to find Abigail, or the Bearwoman. Someone who knows about magic, someone who’d be willing to help. But the woods are a maze that changes its form with every step, and they don’t have any means of communication, even with the flares Jen promised to send up in case anything went awry. 

Jo tries not to think about what might happen if the flares don’t work. Or if some tragedy befalls the group before they have time to send one up. Or if something clever, more clever than any of them put together, manages to get to them first, stealing a flare and then stealing them away like the Voice stole Molly and Mal. Because, though Jo knows it’s naive, she continues to hold onto the promise that Molly didn’t choose this. That Molly’s out there, fighting the Voice, that Mal is fighting alongside her, that they’re not handing over their souls willingly in exchange for more summer days. 

Jo looks up to see Diane in front of her, turns to check that Barney’s still at her back. The trail they walk is becoming more and more narrow with each step they take. Diane keeps insisting this is _good._ At least, for their purposes. 

“The more the trail narrows, the more the forest is trying to steer us away. It means that we’re heading towards something it doesn’t want us to find.”

“Like the Voice,” Jo says. 

“Exactly.”

  
  
It feels like they’ve been walking for days, now. That the night is lasting forever. And who could tell, either way? Time doesn’t work here, not really. When Jo looks up, she sees a starless sky. Cloudy, she’d think, if she was anywhere but here. Instead, she looks up and she grows wary. 

The forest controls everything, here. The deeper in they go, the more powerful it becomes. 

The starless sky is a warning. She’s sure of it. 

* * *

“What does the Voice look like?” Asks Barney. 

“Well,” says Diane, thinking. “Great big red eyes. Body made of shadow. Evil, as far as we can tell…”

  
  
Jo finds herself smirking, despite it all. “ _Evil_ isn’t a physical trait.”

  
  
“It is on this piece of shit.” 

“And we used to have a counselor?” Barney asks. 

Diane nods. “Yeah. Vanessa. She disappeared before you joined up. At first we thought she just went into town on important business, or something. But then she was gone for a long time, and so Hes went looking - she was appointed Stand-In Counselor or something, thought she could boss us around - and she ended up in dark forest. Got lost for a few days. Discovered a scrap of Vanessa’s favorite t-shirt, apparently, muddied and looking a thousands years older than it should have been, but there, nonetheless. Picked it up, and immediately found herself face to face with a pair of glowing red eyes, and voice that chilled her to her bones.”

  
  
“The Voice.”

“We think so, yeah.” She looks at Jo. “At least, matches your descriptions of it.”

“Yeah.” Jo sighs. “Yeah.”

  
  
“Jo?” Says Barney. “Diane?”

“What is it, Barn?”

  
  
“Do you…” they sigh. “Do you think we’re actually going to find Molly?”

  
  
“Of course!” Jo says. 

She hopes she’s not as bad a liar as she feels. 

* * *

They get up and start walking again. The trees get closer and closer together, so thick they feel like a wall of solid wood. But Jo and Diane and Barney push through them. And then they find themselves met with vines. And they tear up the vines and push through these, too, and find themselves met with thorns. And on and on it seems to go, and Jo knows, knows with more than just gut instinct, that the forest doesn’t want them here. 

She barely notices it when written on one of the trees is a word. 

Well, the more accurate description would be _carved into_ one of the trees. 

“What does this say?”

“What?”

  
  
Jo’s stopped walking entirely, staring at the etching in the bark. “There’s something carved into this tree. I know there is.” Curse her horrible eyesight. She's probably due for glasses anytime soon. 

“Wait,” Barney says. “Diane. You can see in the dark, right?”

“How did you know that?”

  
  
Barney sighs. “Do you know how many times I’ve walked into the cabin to find you reading in the dead of night without a light on? It’s not that hard to tell. Emily told me that she actually thought you were a demon or something before she found out you were a goddess because of your wacky night vision.” 

“Okay, fine. I have night vision. It’s a perk of being goddess of the hunt.” 

“Okay,” Jo says, stepping aside from the tree. “Can you read this?”

Diane steps up to it, and squints. “These don’t even sound like real words.”

  
“Just say what it says.”

  
  
“Okay… um… ‘Wham! I Play Level Loom.’” She shakes her head. “It’s probably nothing. I mean, Level Loom? I can’t be the only one here who thinks this is ridiculous.”

  
  
“It’s not ridiculous,” says Jo. “It’s an anagram.”

  
  
“Anagram?”

  
  
“Molly’s speciality.” She tries to sound calm. "It's gotta be a sign. Someone's trying to tell us something." 

Jo grabs a pencil from behind her ear, a pad of paper from her pocket. She starts writing down combinations of letters, scribbling furiously. 

Barney and Diane share a glance behind her back. Diane doesn’t like the Roanokes, not really, but she is worried for them. Barney likes the Roanokes quite a bit; they’re worried for them, too. 

They move away from Jo, sitting on a rock and letting her work in peace. Sometimes they pass a word or two between themselves in ASL - Wren’s been teaching them in their free time around the cabin, and they’re both quite good at it. 

There’s a noise somewhere above them, a flutter of wings. They pay it no mind; there are many creatures in this forest, mostly harmless. Bats are common. 

“Via Elmo, He Pwoily?” Jo mutters. “No, that’s not a word - Leave Him Wool… no, that won’t work, that doesn’t even make sense…” 

The sound of pencil scratches is so loud in Jo’s ears, and the sound of those gears turning and turning in her head, she doesn’t hear the distant screams. April’s screams, she would have known, had she only listened. 

Barney hears the screams. But before they can say anything, they’re gone. Diane looks up to find herself sitting next to no one. 

“Jo?” She says, her voice shaking. 

“Hold up Diane, not now, I’ve almost got this,” she mutters. Jo’s clever. She’s so clever, and she knows it, she knows she can do this. She has a few words down. “I have…” she writes those in. She still has a few more letters left, but then something clicks in her brain.

“Jo,” Diane says, a strange urgency in her voice. “ _Jo.”_

“I’ve got it!” Jo says, finally looking up from her notepad. “I have Molly Powell.” 

She’s so proud of her work, she doesn’t even process the words at first. And then those gears in her head start to turn, again, and she drops her pad on the ground. 

“Oh my god.”

  
  
“Jo?” Asks Diane. “Jo. _Who_ has Molly?” 

“I…” 

_I have Molly Powell._

“ _Hello_ ,” says a twisted voice from above them. 

Diane and Jo look up into that ink black sky. 

Jo almost screams. But she knows better. April’s taught her to stand her ground.

Diane _does_ scream. She figures that now, there’s nothing to lose.

In the sky, wings grown from her back, eyes an icy gold, is Molly. 

“ _I_ have Molly Powell,” says another voice, from behind them. A voice that sends shivers down Jo’s spine, one that’s she’s never quite heard before, but recognizes, nonetheless. 

  
Not a voice. 

_The_ Voice.

“I think we’re going to have a lot of fun this summer,” it says. “Don’t you?”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos and comments if you liked it! This was my first attempt at a Voice AU fic and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Thanks for reading and have a lovely day :)


End file.
